'The Pike', Lucy Hughes-Hallett's life of a vainglorious early 20th-century
poet has a peculiarly modern feel

It takes courage to write a biography like this one. Its subject is so emphatically and relentlessly unimproving that several readers may feel inclined to give up in disgust after a few chapters. Others, having finished it, might fancy a cold bath or a jog around the park. Not a few will wonder why Lucy Hughes-Hallett should have bothered herself with a writer most of whose oeuvre, 48 volumes of it, is forgotten even in his native Italy. As a younger contemporary, Somerset Maugham, remarked, “No day is so dead as the day before yesterday”, and this is where Gabriele d’Annunzio irredeemably belongs.

Or so at first it seems. Yet Hughes-Hallett’s book ranges wider than the cradle-to-grave chronicle of an Italian poet, novelist and dramatist who blagged, blustered, fantasised and fornicated his way to international notoriety. If we examine the lives of others more precisely to understand our own, then there is much to be learnt from the rise and fall of Gabriele d’Annunzio. Eighty years after his death, it is hard not to feel that we are all of us, however embarrassingly, in some sense his heirs and collaborators.

Much of d’Annunzio’s career was devoted to various sorts of reinvention. Enemies were happy to recall that he was born Gabriele Rapagnetta, borrowing his more gracefully archangelic surname from a rich relative who had bequeathed an estate to his father. Italy’s wild Abruzzi region may have furnished a backdrop for his most famous poem, “The Shepherds”, but Pescara, its capital and his birthplace, was the kind of town from which ambitious youth escapes at the first opportunity.

A smart Florentine boarding school provided the necessary polish and fostered his literary gifts. With three volumes of verse published by his 18th birthday, d’Annunzio had leisure for another kind of virtuosity altogether – as the most accomplished poetic seducer since Lord Byron. Hughes-Hallett handles the catwalk parade of mistresses with amusement and compassion. “Don’t do it!” we long to warn Luisa Casati, Ida Rubinstein, Eleonora Duse and the rest, in their feather boas and pearl chokers, as they tumble headlong into the killer embrace, before an inevitable brush-off drives various of them to blackmail, suicide and certifiable insanity. There was briefly a wife, with children attached, but the role of family man was one of the few d’Annunzio never cared to assume.

Becoming Italy’s greatest living poet should have been enough, but he had to succeed as a novelist besides, shocking Rome and Milan with vigorously shaken cocktails of infanticide, lesbianism and swooning sex amid the lilacs, in which delighted readers sniffed “the stench of corruption and depravity”. As a playwright he was similarly all-conquering in epic vehicles for Eleonora Duse, evidently as boring offstage as she was mesmeric in the theatre. Everybody wanted a piece of d’Annunzio and he was happy to oblige so long as they paid his bills, subsidised his spending on clothes and motor cars, and generally helped to sustain the extravagant essay in performance art into which he had transmogrified his life.

Italians are very easily bored and nobody understood this better than d’Annunzio. His outrageous warmongering speeches to Roman crowds in 1915 offered a glamorous distraction from the bourgeois banalities of peacetime. “If it is considered a crime to incite citizens to violence,” he declared, “then I boast of committing that crime.” On the Alpine battlefront, the high command’s prodigal incompetence left him unmoved. As Hughes-Hallett drily notes, “the young men around him were beautiful. He loved them. He rejoiced in the thought that they had been brought here, by him and those like him, so that they might die.”

D’Annunzio’s ultimate glory – and vainglory – arrived with the annexation of Fiume in 1919. For 15 months, having seized control of the Istrian port city as his personal contribution to the postwar dismemberment of Austria-Hungary, the poet-condottiere was uncrowned king of an outrageous ragtag-and-bobtail realm populated by military deserters, Futurist wannabes, whores, crooks and dope fiends. Amid the daily circus of fly-pasts and victory marches by the Arditi, d’Annunzian storm troopers bellowing their war cry of “Eia, Eia, Eia, Alala!”, the ringmaster strutted in his faultlessly tailored uniforms, with more intimate solace provided by his latest odalisque, the pianist Luisa Baccara, whom he called “my golden, poisoned grape”.

Eventually outmanoeuvred by international politicians, d’Annunzio retreated to his “Vittoriale”, the villa on Lake Garda he redesigned as his personal shrine. The throng of acolytes and concubines was undiminished, but by now, ravaged by syphilis and half-blind, their idol had become a morbid, misanthropic shadow. While the Fiume episode had furnished an obvious inspiration for Mussolini, the Duce’s relationship with d’Annunzio was heavily nuanced and ambiguous. News of the latter’s death in 1938 was greeted in Mussolini’s office with a relieved “At last!”, even while Fascism acknowledged its share in the dubious legacy bestowed by d’Annunzio on his 20th-century admirers. Something of its baleful potency survives to nurture our modern celebrity culture and self-obsessed entitlement, as Hughes-Hallett’s book, its exhilarating virtuosity d’Annunzian in the best sense, so significantly proves.